Hey everyone! I've had many friends come and go in life for various reasons and I cherish all the good times and memories we had together. The videos I filmed with them will always represent a time for me when our lives were parallel and we got along, had time to hang out, and simply enjoyed life together as pals. No matter what has happened since or no matter how much their lives have since changed, nothing will change how much those memories mean to me. I've decided to type out a full casting list of all the featured friends who have participated on my show to date from 2015 to the present, arranged in order of when I met them. It explains how we met, their age at the time, how we interacted as friends, and the reason why they aren't seen on camera anymore if they no longer come around. I warn you that some of the stories here are going to be sad and infuriating to read. Unfortunately I've experienced some hurt and betrayal when I extended my hand in friendship and some of the featured friends on the show turned out to not be true friends in the end, but I've always been open and honest with my audience and that extends to this blog. This blog post is not to take away from the great times had together on camera with the people on this list, and I hope everyone understands my intention in disclosing the personal information contained within. 1) T-Wrex - I met T-Wrex at a job we both worked at when he was 19. We found that we enjoyed the same music and TV shows, and we also had a similar sense of humor so I tried to become friends with him. I asked him for his number and tried to make plans to hang out and play basketball or video games with him a few times, but he initially never entertained them and said he was working or spending time with his girlfriend instead. In 2015, he bought a house with his then-girlfriend (who he's now married to). Originally the guest bedroom of his house was going to be rented out by one of her friends but that fell through, so one day at work T-Wrex told me that he was looking for a roommate to help pay their mortgage and asked me if I was interested in renting the room at his house. Having recently moved back to my home state of Ohio from the west coast, I was staying with family at the time and just so happened to be hoping to meet a friend to rent a room with, so I accepted his invite. I moved in shortly after and the two of us quickly became best friends. In October of that year, when he was 21, I created a YouTube channel called The No Deo Duo, with T-Wrex being the "duo" co-star alongside me, in honor of the amazing friendship we now had. Together we were discovered by a cult following of fans who loved the video ideas that I came up with for us to film together for fun, and even though I always did all the technical side of things myself, I shared half of the channel's earnings with him right down the middle in honor of our friendship. I originally nicknamed him Crusher the Dino due to his stompy nature early on in the videos, including a deleted skit where he kicked out the drywall of a bedroom in his basement with his bare feet, but he came up with the better nickname of T-Wrex for himself, as well as the nickname of Primal Instinks for me (I had originally nicknamed myself Vermin the Rat). The joke behind the T-Wrex name was that he wanted to spell it incorrectly as Wrex instead of Rex on purpose since he wasn't good at spelling in real life, and I liked the idea of spelling it that way because it was like saying he was a dinosaur who "wrecks" everything in sight. I had always been fascinated by dinosaurs as a kid and had an entire toy chest full of them when I was younger, and it was like my childhood dream had come true as I now had a best friend who was a "dinosaur" (so to speak). The two of us had each others backs and helped each other out anytime it was needed. We learned a lot from each other as well. For example, T-Wrex co-signed for a loan for the Jeep I drove for 4 and a half years (which I ended up paying off before trading in) since I had still been in the process of building my credit at that time. He had even told me about the Jeep because he had passed it on the road one day and he knew it was my dream vehicle at the time. On my end, I was there for T-Wrex through some personal issues he had. He told me that he believed he had an undiagnosed spectral disorder, and I was always patient with him whenever he would interrupt me or talk out of turn (and get frustrated over it) because he was my best friend and I loved and accepted him for who he was. We even implemented his non-sequitur derailing of the videos we'd film together into a form of comedy for the channel. T-Wrex said he never had a lot of friends and told me how other kids had been cruel to him in school, and as a result he had grown up without empathy. T-Wrex was the type of person who believed "emotions are dumb" and that saying sorry was useless because it was "just words" to him, and nothing ever seemed to be his fault even when he was clearly in the wrong. He told me he believed he was a sociopath, and I accepted this of him as well. I offered him advice and tried to help him realize he wasn't the terrible person he believed himself to be. Having lived together for a few years and being so close, we had a few arguments and minor fights, which were usually caused by a sudden mental episode that he was going through, especially on nights he drank a lot (and smoked weed on top of it without me knowing it), but we were as close of friends off camera as we were on camera and we had so many laughs and great times together. While all the content on my channel was my idea (stompdowns, sports matches, breath-holding contests, stinkpit and stinkshoe humor etc), T-Wrex helped turn it into the staple show that it is now by being a part of it with me and making it fun. He initially didn't care for the idea of being in photos and videos, but once he realized how fun it was and how much people enjoyed our antics and friendship, he grew to love it and prioritized it like I did. He also appreciated the extra money that was being sent in by diehard fans who praised our close friendship and couldn't get enough of the content we filmed together. Unfortunately our close friendship and the channel we had together, especially the video commissions we were getting paid to film, were causing his girlfriend to feel increasingly jealous and insecure, and she began behaving in passive-aggressively rude ways to me at their house all the time and complaining about me behind my back to try to turn T-Wrex against me. I always respected the private time they spent together without interrupting it, but anytime the two of us were playing video games or working out together when she was home, she would repeatedly text him from their bedroom and try to get him to hang out with her instead of me. She would scowl and leave the room they were in if I came home from work or walked into it and would sit in their bedroom with the door closed in protest. Her actions progressed to lying, manipulating, and gaslighting T-Wrex to try to convince him I was a terrible person instead of the loyal best friend and roommate I was to them. After enduring years of this unwarranted abuse and seeing that T-Wrex wasn't going to put a stop to it since it was his love interest who was doing it, I eventually moved out of his house in May of 2019, a month or so before their day of marriage. After temporarily living in a noisy apartment for six months, I found my own home. Along with the abuse and hostility from his wife, I had also grown uncomfortable in their home after hearing them fight in their bedroom one night over him enjoying a fire in his backyard with me for a while instead of laying around and watching TV with her all night. She was hysterically crying about it and T-Wrex was yelling that he was a piece of shit for hurting her feelings and repeatedly punching himself in the head so hard that I could hear it through the walls of the house. T-Wrex married his girlfriend that summer. After I moved out, the two of us remained close friends and continued filming together and everything seemed to be continuing to go well for us. T-Wrex got a dog to fill the void of losing me at his house and he stopped working out as much and started drinking more, and he now weighed 200 pounds. He was around 175 when I moved in with him. He outgrew all the dinosaur and video game t-shirts I had bought for him as birthday and Christmas gifts. While that was sad to hear, I was happy to see him come over one day wearing a new shirt with a T. Rex on it. I told him I liked his shirt, thinking that he bought it to replace the ones I bought him that he outgrew, but I was bothered to hear him say that his wife had bought it for him. I also visited his house after he had gotten married and noticed something his wife had made to celebrate their marriage. It had a picture of them together from their wedding with their names on it, and underneath it it said "c." with the year they met ("c" as in circa). This was also unsettling to me because if you notice on the front page of this website, the name and logo of my show has always been near the top with "c. 2015" under it for the year it was founded. The fact that she likely saw that and wrote "c." with the year they met, which preceded the year I started my channel with him by many years, showed just how ridiculously petty and jealous she was over our friendship. T-Wrex and I continued to hang out every week until one day in early 2021 when he forgot his wife's birthday and took me to a scheduled LASIK eye surgery instead of spending the whole day with her, which was the breaking point of her hatred toward me, and she finally gave him the ultimatum of choosing either my friendship or her marriage. After being best friends for 6 years, T-Wrex blocked my number and when I went to his house to check on him, he told me we weren't friends anymore and that I wouldn't understand why (since I don't do relationships or marriage), and I sadly haven't seen or heard from him since. I uploaded a video on my channel in 2021 announcing his departure (as well as Lord Rubix's) when I still wasn't sure why he had acted that way toward me, and in the video I mentioned he was going through mental and emotional issues and asked everyone to put him in their thoughts. I initially believed it could have been a mental episode he was enduring that would pass like past episodes because of how hurt he clearly was when I went to his house to try to talk to him, and I hoped that he would end up reaching out to me after a while, but he never did. I wrote a more detailed blog about why T-Wrex and I parted ways prior to this, and it can be read by clicking here. 2) Lord Rubix - I met Lord Rubix at the same restaurant job as T-Wrex when he was 19. Though he's always looked a lot younger than he is, Rubix is the same age as Wrex. He initially would stop by Wrex's house while I lived there and we would all drink and play card games and video games together. When I started my YouTube channel, he starting participating on it with us when he was 21. During his time filming with us, I considered him to be the top and most prolific featured friend, a title which has since gone to K2. The three of us together meshed so well on camera that in August of 2020 I temporarily renamed the channel "The No Deo Trio" in honor of Rubix's participation. I originally nicknamed him Kid Rubix because of his youthful appearance, but after YouTube was fined for child safety issues, their employees began mistakenly assuming he was a minor because of his nickname and age-restricted and even removed some of his videos. I changed it to Lord Rubix after that to avoid further issues. Not only was he good at solving Rubik's cubes, but he also had one tattooed on his arm. The "Lord" part came from Coltrain, who one day accidentally called him Lord Rubix on camera because he forgot his nickname was Kid Rubix. Once I needed to think of a new name for him, I went with Coltrain's mistake because I had found it to be humorous. Rubix and I had a unique dynamic together whenever we filmed. He enjoyed being the antagonist or bully in scenarios against me where he would regularly tickle torture me, repeatedly block my breathing with his hands or feet for prolonged periods of time, and force me to smell his shoes, socks, feet and armpits. Like T-Wrex and me, he didn't use deodorant, and he would intentionally skip showering for a day or two before coming over so he could apply maximum torture to me. Anytime I would suggest filming a video where I was the bully to him, he would smile and reply "I'm always the one that does that to you," so we just started filming it that way all the time since we both had a lot of fun with it and he preferred it that way. Despite his slender build and nerdy appearance, Lord Rubix ironically had a very dominant side to him that he liked to entertain. He's one of the few people I've filmed with to date who intentionally blocked my breathing to the point where I had convulsions and was at the brink of losing consciousness. One instance of this happening was during two back-to-back outtake breath-holding videos where I sat on T-Wrex's couch and Rubix covered my nose and mouth with his hands and wanted to push me to 5 minutes. The first try I made it to 4:15, and the second time I made it to 4:30, and both times afterward my lips were blue, my head tingled, and I momentarily shook, and he watched it happen from above with interest in his eyes. I shared these outtake videos with my fans on Patreon. While most featured friends would get nervous if they saw me struggling to breathe for so long, Rubix always smiled and would say "if you pass out, you'll just wake right back up after I let go." Another instance of this happening was during the final armpit smother of the Lord Rubix Stinkpit Smother Bully extra, where he taped my mouth shut and pressed his armpit so tight against my nostrils that I couldn't breathe, and he held it there for so long that I felt light-headed and tingling from lack of oxygen after he finally let go. Since I love holding my breath, it was always so much fun to film these types of videos with him, and because he enjoyed pushing my limits so far, I had actually developed an excited kind of fear of him coming over toward the end of his appearances because I knew I had to mentally prepare myself for the oxygen torture he was going to want to administer to me. One day he told me that he enjoyed choking his girlfriends who were into having it done to them and I wasn't at all surprised to hear it (lol). Rubix, however, was known to just disappear on T-Wrex and me throughout the years we knew him. First he stopped replying to us or trying to make plans with us for 6 months for no given reason, then once I told him about fans asking for him to return and film video commissions with us, he began visiting again. Rubix moved in with a friend an hour away in 2018 and told us to give him a little time to get moved in, but we didn't end up seeing him for about nine months before he starting visiting again and returned on camera. Then in 2019 Rubix told us he was moving back to our side of town and he nudged me about making him a full-time member, and this is when I renamed the channel to The No Deo Trio and began giving him a third of the channel's earnings along with T-Wrex and me (aside from the solo commissions I was paid to film, which I kept for myself). T-Wrex was weary that Rubix would just disappear on us again, but we gave it a shot and he came around regularly for a while and we all had a blast together. One day when I was discussing my asexual identity with him where I said that being bisexual is a gift because you have the ability to like anyone without being limited to one gender, Lord Rubix replied to that by saying he agreed and that for him he preferred to be with women over men as far as the sexual and dating aspect goes. He said he enjoyed having the casual fun he did with me but that was as far as he'd ever go with that side of him, which is exactly where I stand since I'm asexual and likewise have imprinted interests that I only like to casually entertain in a non-sexual way. Rubix had often complained about not having a girlfriend and said he wanted a family one day. He ended up meeting a girl on a dating app and fell in love with her. T-Wrex expressed our fear that he would drop out now that he had a girlfriend, but he insisted he wouldn't, though it became more difficult to get ahold of him or get him come by as time went on. He mentioned to me at this time that T-Wrex and I were the only friends he had been hanging out with lately since his girlfriend had now moved into his parents' house with him. He began complaining that we were stressing him out by texting him and trying to have him come by and still be in the videos all the time, even though the reason we were doing it was because we wanted him to continue being part of the show we had all been participating together in for 5 years, and right after T-Wrex ghosted me in March 2021 he decided he would no longer participate anymore either as he was in the process of trying to find a house with his girlfriend so they could start a family. 3) Toast - Another friend from the restaurant job who I met when he was 20, Toast made early appearances on the channel from 2016 to 2018 and brought a funny persona along with him. Originally nicknamed Bread Boy, which was based off a nickname he had given himself years prior, I changed his nickname to Toast after YouTube began getting heat for child safety issues and I feared their employees would restrict his videos like they had started doing with Lord Rubix's when his nickname was still Kid Rubix because they mistakenly assumed him to be a minor. As the years went on, Toast became less social and was in and out of toxic relationships with women that never lasted long and always ended on bad terms. It always seemed to be the girl's fault every time, and this was a destructive pattern that we tried to talk to him about but it was ultimately up to him to make the change. During one of his final video appearances on the channel he appears sad and lost in thought because beforehand he had been on his phone arguing with his then-girlfriend instead of enjoying his visit with me. Things got worse, and he eventually stopped coming around and was saying negative things about the people who he once hung out with. He liked being in the videos at first but he was also suddenly saying negative things about the type of content we filmed and had one of his friends leave a rude comment on one of the videos he and I had filmed together. After he quit the job we met at, he ended up getting hired at the next job that I was already working at. It was a little awkward seeing him again after the things he had been saying about everyone but I was still kind to him and offered to hang out if he ever wanted. He didn't take me up on that though and instead attempted to integrate with a group of people from our job who hung out together like a high school clique. Unfortunately for Toast, they didn't accept him into their clique, and they quickly stopped inviting him to their get-togethers at bars, or they would leave work without him and either lie about or not tell him where they were going. I remember one day at work he had angrily flipped out on a co-worker over a miscommunication he had regarding the training instructions she had given him, and it must have left a bad taste in the group's mouth. T-Wrex and I continued to try to invite him over but he wouldn't ever come by, then he would oddly complain that nobody ever hung out with him anymore and said that he felt forgotten about. One day at work when I told him Lord Rubix had stopped by, he said "what am I, chopped liver?" I reminded him that he's welcome to come over anytime. He continued never taking me up on plans so I eventually stopped offering and we fell out of touch. 4) Sloth - Sloth was a good friend I met at the same restaurant job when he was 23. He had a funny, stoic and awkward personality and sense of humor that I really enjoyed, and we always had fun whenever we'd hang out. He appeared on the channel and in video commissions on and off from 2016 to early 2019. I nicknamed him Sloth because I asked him what animal describes him most and he answered "sloth," and he was always in a calm mood and soft-spoken. I don't recall ever seeing him angry or having a burst of energy. I extended his nickname to be Slothotto ('sluh-THAW-toe') at one point but I didn't feel like changing it in all the video titles, descriptions, and behind-the-scenes extras, so I kept it shortened as Sloth. After a while, Sloth accidentally got his girlfriend he lived with pregnant and things changed for him. After his child was born, he still came around, though not as often, and he began complaining about how his girlfriend was allowed to hang out with her friends but she told him he wasn't allowed to spend time with his. He was also the only one working for a living in their relationship during this time and this didn't make him happy. He tried to make a deal with his girlfriend about sharing social lives but it didn't succeed. On one of the last days he came by, he showed up late in the evening and wasn't there long because his girlfriend texted him and asked him to go buy her weed using his money and bring it to her, even though he was in the middle of hanging out with friends he hadn't seen in a while, and he felt obligated to have to leave and do it. He claimed he would come back after dropping it off but we knew he wasn't coming back. At one point, Sloth told me I was the only friend who hadn't given up on trying to stay in touch and make plans with him because of how scarce he was able to do it anymore. When Sloth broke the news that his girlfriend had accidentally gotten pregnant a second time, his responses and availability went to zero, and the last time I talked to him when I happened to run into him in public, he told me his time was completely dedicated to working full time and being home with his family. I had managed to at least keep in touch with him for a while but he never returned my calls or messages so I decided to let him be. 5) Coltrain - Coltrain is a juggalo who liked to party, work out, and have good times with his friends. I also met him at the same restaurant when he was around 22. He participated in a few channel videos and commissions from 2016 to 2018 as a way to go with the flow while hanging out with T-Wrex and me. I nicknamed him Coltrain because it was based off an actual nickname he had gone by. Whenever he would visit though, Coltrain would get drunk and begin aggressively asking me what my sexual identity is and why I didn't like vagina, and if that meant I was gay if I didn't. It was a very ignorant approach to my asexuality, and no matter how many times I answered him truthfully, he would continue this annoying pattern when he'd visit. Ironically, he would then start asking T-Wrex and me if he could give us oral sex, and there was no hint of him joking. This became a recurring thing for him, and I told T-Wrex I wasn't much of a fan of Coltrain anymore because of it. It got worse when Coltrain would smoke weed and say crazy things like he was planning to kill a bunch of innocent people and then die of an overdose. After T-Wrex finally told him how crazy all this was, he ended up quitting weed and didn't say as crazy things anymore (at least out loud). I occasionally kept in contact with him after I moved out from T-Wrex's house though we didn't hang out much aside from one time when he visited my house to work out and play basketball. Coltrain was always closer to T-Wrex than me and seemed to be the only one of our mutual friends that his wife wasn't rude to whenever he visited because he went out of his way to try to be respectful to her and earn her acceptance after seeing how she treated his other friends. After T-Wrex blocked my number and I posted a video announcing his departure on my channel, Coltrain texted me and said it was bullshit that I had done it. I explained to him that I had to tell my fans what was going on and that the video was clearly heartfelt in nature, but he replied with a middle finger emoji, and his lack of understanding or sympathy of the matter cost him my friendship. 6) Danny Duck - Danny Duck was another friend I met at the restaurant job when he was around 21. His nerdy personality and dad jokes rubbed off on me, and my first impression was that he was a really cool person. He had a reputation for being flaky when it came to plans with friends so we didn't hang out at all outside of work at first (at one point, Danny had bleached the tips of his hair blonde and T-Wrex told me people at work started calling him "frosted flake"). Instead, we would hang out at work and socialize, and we'd do things together like have breath-holding contests in the storage area, and one time he let me choke him unconscious and laughed about it. One day I took my shirt off at work as a joke and he stared wide-eyed at my body until another co-worker who was walking by teased him about it and he snapped back to reality. Danny had a girlfriend who was a sweetheart of his since their school days, and before they got a house together and were living in an apartment, Danny would try to flirt with younger girls at work in front of me and ask them for their numbers to go out on dates. I asked him when he visited one day why he did this, and he told me that he felt he was still young and even though he was in a relationship and living with a girl, he deserved to have more time to explore other women (even if he had to hide it from her). Before he appeared on my channel, Danny shocked me one day with his behavior at work. Normally calm and fairly soft-spoken, Danny was in a bad mood one night that I'd never seen him in before. I attempted to fill a bucket with water in his work area so I could clean the floor of my area, but he told me I couldn't use the faucet there because he had just cleaned his floor and didn't want me to dirty it. I laughed, thinking he was joking, since water obviously wouldn't dirty a clean floor and I had no intention of spilling water on it anyway, so I went to fill the bucket. He pushed the bucket away and repeated that I wasn't using that faucet and told me to use the mop sink area instead, which was positioned at an angle against a wall that would take 3 times as long to fill the bucket instead of using the faucet in his area that everyone always normally used. I reminded him that everyone always uses this particular faucet and went to try to fill the bucket again, but this time he snatched it out of my hand, walked over to the mop sink area and threw it down, and demanded I use it instead. By now I was getting annoyed by his behavior so I grabbed the bucket and told him to knock it off and again tried to fill it. This time Danny got menacingly close to my face, glared at me with fire in his eyes, and threateningly told me to get away from the faucet. I detected danger and felt like he was about to hit me so I instinctively pushed him backwards and told him to get out of my face. He seemed shocked that I stood up to him and suddenly became the victim (instead of the aggressor he actually was) and told me it was "messed up" of me to shove him. He ran to the manager's office and basically told her that I had assaulted him for no reason, and she had him write an incident statement about it. This new manager informed him that he would need witnesses in order for any reprimand to be had against me, and while I was going back and forth filling my bucket up with water to clean the floor, I saw him huddled with two friends of his at work that night, first one and then the other, and whispering something to them with his arm around their shoulder. One had been in the other corner of the restaurant washing dishes and the other had been cooking food on the other side of a wall, which would have been impossible to see and hear what actually happened. The manager also had me write a statement of what happened but didn't mention to me that I should have witnesses write statements in my defense if there were any (there wasn't anyone else in the area at the time anyway). The next day I showed up at work, the two managers on duty were waiting for me. They informed me that Danny and two other employees had written identical incident statements claiming that I had violently slammed Danny against the equipment in his area, which of course was false as I had merely pushed him in self-defense and his body had not made contact with anything. Having three statements against my one, I was terminated from the job I met T-Wrex and so many other friends at, and when I appealed the poorly-handled decision to the corporate office, the recently-appointed director of operations sided with Danny and denied my appeal, and she also refused to take action against him as well even though he started the altercation. I argued that I had worked there for two years, had perfect attendance, high performance scores, and zero write-ups, but that apparently meant nothing to her. T-Wrex and other people taunted Danny at work for a while after this incident by calling him "statement guy" for writing the report on me and saying things like "sorry man, don't get me fired over it" at any given opportunity. I ended up finding a new restaurant job the very next week and accepted that I no longer got to work with my best friend and other friends I had met at that job, and eventually the sadness I had initially felt subsided. Against my better judgment, I had Lord Rubix reach out to Danny down the road after I no longer felt angry at him. I was honestly happy at my new job and chose to view it as the bright side of suffering since the previous work environment had been toxic, and I decided I should forgive Danny for what he did since he had otherwise been a nice friend to me. After Rubix passed on my message, Danny texted me and apologized, and he admitted he had been in the wrong for what he did and what happened never should have gone that far, and he offered to meet me for lunch. This was during late 2016 when he was 22. After lunch, the two of us went back to T-Wrex's house where I was living at the time and he accepted my invite to participate on my YouTube channel with me. After having a few good wrestling matches with Danny where he defeated me (and choked me nearly unconscious in one of them), I came up with the idea of brethling, and the first match of this fan-favorite sport was had with him. It was an instant success on the channel, and Danny continued coming around and participating a few times into summer of 2017, even filming a few plastic bag challenge commissions with me where he tried to refuse the cash I gave him as payment for them, but I insisted that he accept it. I nicknamed him Danny Duck after he told me one day that his spirit animal was a duck. He told me he had a lot of fun participating but said he didn't want to intrude because it was "your guys' channel" (referring to T-Wrex and me), but I told him that we featured all of our mutual friends on it so he wasn't intruding. As a result of the excitement from the success and fun of brethling, I continued to try to make plans with Danny to come over and continue going with it but he began reverting to his flaky behavior he was renowned for. He would sleep through our plans as a result of being up all night watching re-runs of sci-fi shows or give excuses like "I'm playing this card game on my computer right now and I really just want to keep playing it by myself" even though we had made plans, and he started doing this anytime I'd reach out. I found out from Lord Rubix that he was complaining about me trying to make plans with him too much. I admit I did reach out to him more often than I normally would text my friends, but that's only because he said he had a lot of fun with the friendly sports competition we were having and wanted to come over more to do it, and I was trying to make myself as available for it as I could and follow up with him on those plans. I felt like Danny had only come by a few times to make himself look and feel better after getting me fired from that job, and I expressed to him in a text how I didn't appreciate him blowing me off after I went out of my way to make things right with him, especially when he should have been the one to reach out to me instead of me having to go through a mutual friend to do it. He blocked my number in response and lied to mutual people we knew by claiming I had said terrible things to him that I didn't actually say as justification for it. Before I worked with him, Danny had survived a cancer scare after his girlfriend noticed something strange on him, and thanks to her noticing it, he went and got it checked out in time and they were able to remove the cancerous area without any issue. In the text I sent him that he blocked me after, I tried to open his eyes by telling him he miraculously survived a cancer scare but he was flaking out on his friends and being unfaithful to his girlfriend with this second chance at life and I urged him to treat people better. Danny twisted my words and told Rubix he blocked me because I made fun of his cancer, which was an outrageous lie and something I would never do. He manipulated Rubix into believing it though which was disappointing, just as it was disappointing when Rubix had illogically told me I had been at fault for him getting me fired from my job because I put my hands on him and he had never touched me, even though he had been the instigator and aggressor. Rubix was the only one who had sided with Danny during that incident and I never understood how he could have rationally believed that Danny had been the victim instead of me. I took this as a sign that once Danny had exposed his fangs as a snake by getting me fired that he would never change and would obviously be capable of doing something like that again, and it would be best if I didn't hang out with him anymore anyway. After our second and final falling out, Danny found a house with his girlfriend. He tried asking T-Wrex to come over and help him paint his house and do other tasks with him but T-Wrex refused to hang out with him because of what he did to me. At one point T-Wrex said he'd go to Danny's house only if I could too, to which Danny said no, so T-Wrex declined. Danny later married his girlfriend. It's still sad to me how things turned out because Danny and I had a close connection at first and we both liked each other a lot before things took a turn for the worst. 7) Staggz - Staggz was yet another friend I met at that first restaurant job I worked at, and he was 18 years old at the time. Staggz has Asperger's and he's academically intelligent with a very infectious personality that I really liked. It wouldn't be until a few years after I met him that he began coming by to hang out and participate on the YouTube channel with T-Wrex and me in February of 2018. I nicknamed him Staggz because it was close to a nickname he had already been using. He enjoyed being on the show and filming video commissions so much that I made him an honorary full-time member for the two months he came around, and he told us that he wanted to come by one day every week in order to keep it going because he loved it so much. Out of everyone I've filmed stinkshoe-themed videos with thus far, he holds the record for having the smelliest shoes and feet as a result of his hygiene habits. An extra titled Staggz Super Stinkfoot Bully highlights one of his best performances on camera where he plays a bully who teases me about getting enjoyment from smelling stinky shoes and proceeds to force me to smell his as a way to humiliate me. A few times toward the end of the video he steps on my face and his feet reeked worse that day than anyone I've ever filmed with. When Staggz started hanging out with us, he was on spring break from college, which meant he had extra time to come around. Once classes resumed, however, he started getting behind and overwhelmed with schoolwork and his job, and he also had a girlfriend who he always liked to say was "the boss" in their relationship that desired his company. He asked once if his girlfriend could come around and watch us film videos together but I felt this would be awkward so I said "maybe next time." He was going to college to be a chemist, and the classwork and homework for such a prestigious job title was excruciating for him. He suddenly canceled on us three weeks in a row, and the fourth week he finally threw in the towel and announced he had to drop out from filming videos with us anymore. He said "you're probably going to be mad at me for this" but had no choice. I was admittedly upset at first because he left seven paid commissions unfilmed that I had to apologize and refund fans for. Those videos had built up since he had canceled several weeks in a row but assured us he'd still come by each time, and when he dropped out he didn't even offer to complete the final commissions before quitting. He didn't understand why I was unhappy about this and he didn't follow through with plans we tried to make to come around again during his next break from school, and he ultimately fell out of contact from being overwhelmed with work, college, and the relationship he was in. I would learn down the road from T-Wrex, who heard from Coltrain that Staggz's longtime girlfriend had been unfaithful to him and he found out about it when she became pregnant with someone else's child. This devastated him to the point of moving out of state to get away and see other parts of the country to clear his mind. I spoke to him once after this happened, and during that conversation I apologized to him for getting mad at him for dropping out on the show. He told me that I had nothing to be sorry for and said that he had fun filming all the videos he was in. He also said that during that time he was struggling mentally and emotionally and because of it and the stress of everything on his plate he had to drop out but it had never been anything personal. 8) Chief Slapahoe - Another friend from the restaurant job who I met when he was 18. He seemed like a pretty cool kid who liked to show up to work stoned that I found to be entertaining. One day at work while he was rolling silverware I clamped my hand over his nose and mouth and asked him how much silverware he could roll in one breath, and when I let go immediately afterward, his eyes lit up and he smiled and told me that he liked that. Being someone who's open and non-judgmental when it comes to harmless interests, I laughed and started occasionally going around doing this to him at the restaurant, and it would make him smile every time. He ended up quitting that job though and I didn't see him again for a while. It wasn't until a few years later in early 2017 when he was 20 that I saw him at my next job (which I helped him get hired at) that he started coming over to hang out, and he participated in sports matches on my channel with me during this time. He chose his nickname of Chief Slapahoe because he's half Native American and thought it sounded cool, and he was genuinely surprised when I told him that this name was actually a meme, as he had thought that he had come up with it on his own. Living up to his nickname, he destroyed me every time we wrestled to the point where it was too one-sided, and he unfortunately declined to participate in brethling because he said the hand over mouth aspect of it would be too weird for him. He told me he had ADHD so he was able to have match after match when it came to regular wrestling and he never seemed to tire out. A funny memory I have is during the wrestling video posted on the channel where he repeatedly taps me out, I resorted to using the stinkpit sleeper on him to try to win, but instead of tapping out, he groaned and then yelled out about my armpit hairs being in his mouth so I laughed and let him go. While Chief Slapahoe declined to participate in brethling, he did agree to attempt to try to make me pass out from not breathing by covering my nose and mouth with his hands because a patron had offered a very generous amount of money if this event could be captured on camera. We gave it a few tries but I wasn't comfortably able to sit there and let him prevent me from breathing all the way to that point (I would later accomplish it with K2's help down the road), and one of the attempts we filmed ended up being uploaded to my channel as a breath-holding battle episode. His other appearance on camera was when he filmed boxing matches with me, but this ended up putting a strain on our friendship. The boxing videos I film have always just been for fun, but he decided to intentionally throw ridiculously hard punches at me to try to hurt me when I was only ever sparring with him. This resulted in him punching me in the liver one day which caused me to be sore for nearly two weeks straight. Friends of mine who watched the video told me they felt it was really messed up of him to be doing that. I was a good sport about it until I found out he was going around showing his friends and our co-workers the video and trying to act like a badass for beating me in boxing when I hadn't even been trying my hardest like he was. I deleted the video and decided to stop inviting him to rematches, and though he had expressed interest in filming a duct tape escape video with me instead, he found a new job and a girlfriend around this time and began hardly replying to messages anymore so we ended up drifting apart. 9) Brinkumb - He was a 27-year-old co-worker at my next restaurant job who only made one appearance on my channel in January 2017 and I only hung out with one time. He had asked me for a ride one day and, not wanting to just be used like a taxi since I only recently met him, I told him I would give him one if he hung out with me for a while since I had the day off and no plans. He agreed, so I picked him up and brought him back to T-Wrex's house where we went swimming together. We ended up filming an above-water breath-holding contest that day for my channel. He went unnamed on the channel for a few years until one day I came up with a nickname for him so he'd be credited for his appearance. Afterward, he had me drive him to the store, where he spent time picking up scratched-off lottery tickets in the parking lot in the hopes that one would somehow be a winner that a person accidentally dropped. He went inside and bought cigarettes, then I dropped him off at his destination. A few days later at work he asked to borrow ten dollars from me until next pay day, and I loaned it to him even though I don't like loaning people money. The next pay day came and he claimed he didn't have enough money to pay me back and that I'd have to wait another two weeks. This made me feel angry and taken advantage of. During this time, there was also an issue at this job where employees' cigarettes had gone missing that they left in the locker storage area, and Brinkumb had been narrowed down as a prime suspect. Seeing as he may have stolen ten dollars from me by not paying me back on top of possibly stealing from other people I worked with, I got in his face the next day at work and told him he needed to have that for me by next pay day the very latest. He was surprised by this, and the next day at work he walked out on the job and never returned, and I made no effort to contact him again. Consequentially, the cigarettes stopped disappearing from the employee locker room after he quit. 10) Storm - Storm was a 19-year-old friend I met at my next job. He was very athletic and played many sports, so naturally I invited him to hang out and participate in the sparring matches and breath-holding contest on my channel with me. I also respected the fact that he didn't smoke, do drugs, or drink despite his young age, and he was also independent in the sense that he avoided dating because he didn't like the idea of it. It was with Storm that I proposed the idea of wrestling to be added on my channel, and in April of 2017 the first wrestling match ever was uploaded to it featuring Storm versus me. He used the nickname Storm because it was actually a part of his real name. The first time he tried sparring was with me when we filmed together and I thought it was cool that I was able to add to his list of athletics. He was a good wrestler, and we were evenly matched because we were tied in how many rounds we won. One day when he came by for a match, I laughed and warned him that I hadn't showered that day, and he smiled and said "that's okay, I didn't either." Another time, we had asked someone else we worked with to participate with us but they didn't want to, and my respect for Storm grew after he called the kid a weiner for it. Storm came around a few times and participated in a total of 5 videos, but his life was already busy while he was coming around, with him telling me he had one day every week to possibly hang out. He had a lot on his plate despite his young age as he was working two jobs and attending college. When he quit the job I met him at and his new one was more physical labor, he didn't follow through on a few attempts to make plans with me and then gave up on replying altogether shortly after, and we fell out of touch as a result. 11) K2 - I met K2 at my next job in 2017 when he was 19. He told me he was hurting for money that he needed to repair his car with and was trying to make some fast. I told him about my channel and I explained that if he appeared on it and gained fans, those fans might begin commissioning him for custom videos that I would pay him to be in. He liked the idea and came over that year with one of his friends, Tuna Kan Kel. He told me to use K2 as a nickname for him because it's a nickname he's been called since he was really young. K2 and Tuna Kan Kel played Super Smash Bros. with T-Wrex and me at Wrex's house and we talked while playing the game and got to know each other. K2 eventually asked what kind of video we should film for his and Kel's channel debut, and naturally I suggested a four-man stompdown. The Double Duo Stompdown video was uploaded to my channel in September, and for years it was the most-viewed stompdown video on the channel until the Psyche-out Stompdown video recently overtook it. For some reason, YouTube employees targeted both breath-holding battle videos he was featured in on my channel and took them both down. In the second one, filmed in late 2018, he blocked my breathing with his hands to the point where my lips were blue and I nearly passed out, which could explain why they removed that one, but the first one we filmed together in October 2017 was a standard breath-holding battle where we each had a turn. Of course YouTube refused the appeals I submitted, so I ended up sharing those deleted videos with my fans on Patreon to continue enjoying. In the beginning, K2 was unsure how to act on camera as it's something he'd never done before, resulting in awkward pauses and reminders of what he was supposed to say and do that I'd have to edit out, especially during paid commissions, but overtime he got the hang of it and has grown to be a big part of the show. A milestone achievement was captured on camera with him one day in October 2017 when he managed to cover my nose and mouth with his hands to the point where I fully lost consciousness on camera. I felt myself going out so I tapped his hand, and after he removed them I passed out and convulsed for a few seconds while he watched on and asked if I was good with a laugh. I titled the video Breathless Blackout and made it available as a behind-the-scenes extra. While he didn't like filming them so much at first, he went on to become an ace at the foot bully behind-the-scenes videos. His performance and banter in the K2 Face Step Bully extra is one of his best to date, and K2 Smelly Socks Stinkfoot Bully is the most popular stinkfoot video with my patrons. K2 has always had really smelly feet since I've known him and it makes those types of videos more authentic. After his initial appearance, K2's car died and he was left without a ride. He also ended up leaving the job we had together to find a new one. He managed to stop by to film a few commissions until he got things back on track and was visiting again in 2019. He continued coming around and filming channel videos and commissions until early 2020 when he went off the grid for an entire year, working a job moving furniture full time. During summer of 2021, after T-Wrex and Lord Rubix had left the show, K2 re-emerged when his job was unable to accommodate him for a while due to staffing issues. He has since gone on to be the only featured friend, aside from Private Billy when he's able to visit, to continue coming around and being part of the show. He fits in very well with the humor, including the staple stinkpit and stinkshoe humor that T-Wrex and Lord Rubix helped me build with my fans. 12) Tuna Kan Kel - He was K2's friend that he brought over with him the first time he came by, and he was 18 when I met him and first filmed with him in 2017. He's the youngest featured friend on the show along with Galyx, who was also 18, though Kel was 19 in every appearance after his initial one. He came up with his own nickname of "Tuna Kan" based off the tattoo of an open tuna can near his ankle, and I added the Kel after it in place of his real name that he originally wanted to use. Him and K2 had given each other tattoos when they were younger, with K2 drawing a tuna can on Kel (that also looked like a toilet seat) and Kel tattooing a diamond on K2. After that first visit as well as another visit that same year to film a stompdown-themed commission, I didn't see Tuna Kan Kel again because he moved back with a family member who lived in another city. It wasn't until I reached out to him in late 2018 and he told me he had moved back closer that I invited him to participate on the channel again. This was during the time that K2 wasn't coming around whenever he didn't have his car anymore. Kel was now 19 and also didn't have a car, but T-Wrex didn't have a problem picking him up and dropping him off because he was a cool kid to hang with and he wanted to be on the show with us. He idolized Machine Gun Kelly and aspired to be a rapper one day, and his reason for trying out for the videos was that he wanted to dip his toes in every artistic outlet possible and try to build on it. Tuna Kan Kel was an instant fit with the show, having a knack for being able to jump right into whatever character he was asked to be and bantering like a natural. He excelled in the bully-themed behind-the-scenes commissions and was also an excellent wrestler. K2 had even told me that Kel would be good in the bully videos since they're more his character, and I remember during the filming of one he actually kicked me in the head while I was on the ground acting like a defenseless nerd as per the script. He also went to stomp T-Wrex in the nuts during one of the Couch Foot Bully commissions. He admitted he wasn't a fan of the goofy style of videos, such as the comedy video of his induction into our show. This was an idea he proposed we film, and T-Wrex and me filmed it from a goofy standpoint that he didn't fit well with. Because of how popular he was with the fans and how fun he was to film with, I made him an honorary full-time member for the two months he came around, just as I did with Staggz before him. Unfortunately, his availability began to shift after two months. Initially he had to cancel plans a few times because his family he was staying with needed him home, and this was completely understandable. However, down the road he began canceling for reasons such as him forgetting our plans, him sleeping in, or even him not being able to come by because he had to do his laundry. I was beginning to think that he was viewing this more as a job or obligation than the fun it was supposed to be, especially since he was working a factory job full time that was exhausting him. I feared he would soon get overwhelmed and drop out just like Staggz did. It didn't make me happy when he texted me one day after canceling on coming over to film paid commissions that came in for him and tried to ask me to loan him money electronically. I told him that if he had come over and filmed with us like we had planned, he'd have been given cash for it like always, and he laughed and said I was right, but still asked if I could help him out. He asked me for $50 and claimed it was to go out to eat with his dad, but I told him I would only send him $20 as an act of kindness. When I tried to send it via Cash App, it kept failing on his end for some reason so he eventually gave up and thanked me anyway. I thought it odd of him to ask for an amount like that, and I wondered if he was actually just looking for money to party. He claimed he had cleaned up his act from drugs and was looking to surround himself with people like T-Wrex and me who didn't use drugs (aside from T-Wrex smoking weed, which I wouldn't learn he had been doing because he for whatever reason hid it from everyone until later down the road when a pipe fell out of his pocket and he admitted it) and would be a better influence on him, but once he started getting same-day cash from us his behavior changed, and to this day I'm still not sure if it's because he used it to start partying again or not. He once had T-Wrex use some of the cash he made from filming with us to buy beer for him and a girlfriend he had at the time on the way to dropping him off. I tried to reach out to him after this to have him film the video commissions that were piling up since he had canceled so many times recently, and he kept jerking me around that day so much that I finally got annoyed and gave up on him. He initially told us he'd be ready that day at 12pm, but then that changed to 1pm, then it got pushed back again and again, and after a while T-Wrex and I started drinking together and assumed he wasn't coming by. He finally tried texting that he was ready at around 7:30pm, but by that time neither T-Wrex nor me were in a state to drive since we had been drinking, so I told him we weren't picking him up and I also added that if he's serious about being in the show with us he needs to make himself a little more available. I wasn't rude or angry at all in my message to him, it was simply me being honest and direct. Kel didn't text back, nor did he text me the day after that, and I felt it best to leave him be because I didn't feel like being jerked around anymore or having more fans become disserviced by him not showing up. I tried reconnecting with him again down the road to give him another chance, and he said he'd be interested in possibly filming some challenge videos again but nothing too goofy because he wanted to be a rapper one day and had an image to keep. Then, instead of apologizing to me for leaving us hanging with those commissions (which K2 returned and got paid to film instead at the patrons' request), he accused me of getting mad at him for not being available when he had to be there for his family -- which was a lie because I had always respected that whenever he told me it was the case. While I admit I lost patience with him, I would never try to force anyone to put videos with friends before their family. This really bothered me to hear him say that so I told him off. He didn't respond, but I would discover that he got angry because of that and made a cryptic, public social media post about it where he didn't name T-Wrex or me but wrote something along the lines of "I gave it my best but it wasn't enough for you. You guys wonder why you're in the boat you're in of not having people to film with. My real friends stand by me and kick my ass when I need it. If I dropped people from my life because they upset me one time then I'd have nobody." I created a throwaway account to reach out to him and tell him I wanted to squash the beef he clearly had and asked him if that post he made was about me. He reacted by deleting the post and blocking the throwaway account I messaged him from. I asked K2 what Kel's problem was since his version of why I stopped reaching out to him to film with me wasn't true, and K2 revealed to me that Kel had suddenly ghosted him as a friend without even giving a reason back when Kel was still filming with us. The two of them had been best friends since childhood and they sometimes fought like brothers because of it, but this was still surprising to hear. When Kel was filming with me for two months, he commented that he was trying to stay away from bad influences like K2, which had been shocking to hear since they had been friends practically their entire lives. While K2 and I remain friends to this day, neither of us has heard from Tuna Kan Kel because he's apparently holding grudges against us for his own reasons. 13) Foxtrot - At 32 years old during the time of his one appearance in October of 2017, Foxtrot is currently the oldest friend featured on my channel. I met him at my next job, and he had a quiet, shy, but friendly demeanor to him that I liked. He came off as a person you have to talk to first in order to get a response, so I decided to be kind and start talking to him. We ended up talking about YouTube after he mentioned how much he enjoyed watching videos on it, so I told him I had a channel he should check out. The next day at work he said he enjoyed the videos he watched and told me he also liked to drive his car barefoot. I asked him if he'd want to hang out sometime and he invited me to go to the YMCA with him. Even though I had gym equipment at T-Wrex's house, I met him there and we worked out, then we went into the steam room, the sauna, and the spa pool together afterward. He mentioned he was a big fan of the steam room and asked me if I'd like to go in another time with him, but I told him I had to go home to start getting ready for work that day. Next, I invited him to come over to T-Wrex's where I was living at the time and to be on my channel since he said he liked YouTube. He tried to get me to go to the gym with him again instead, but I countered this by saying I had equipment we could use at the house to work out with if he wanted to. He mentioned there was no steam room at the house and I laughed and said he could go a day without it, and he finally agreed to stop by. We filmed the Psyche-out Stompdown video that's on my channel together that day, which is currently the most-viewed stompdown video of all time, as well as an outtake breath-holding battle where I held my breath for 4 minutes and 15 seconds while he covered my nose and mouth. I felt light-headed and got close to passing out at the end of that video so I didn't upload it to the channel for fear of it being taken down, so instead I shared it with my fans on Patreon. We brainstormed ideas for a nickname for him. I told him an easy guide to use for a nickname would be a person's name followed by the name of an animal, since a lot of us on the channel had used animals as personas (rat, dinosaur, panther, sloth, duck etc.) I threw "Fox" out there as an example and he told me he always liked the name Foxtrot, so we went with that. Foxtrot ended up calling off sick one day from work after this, then he didn't show up or bother calling for his next few shifts. I reached out to him to see what was going on and he told me he suffered from severe depression that gets so bad for him that he can't even get out of bed for days sometimes. I was instantly sympathetic for my new friend and offered to talk to him to help him through it, but he said unfortunately talking didn't help and he just needed time to get through it alone, and I respected this. He ended up getting fired from the job we worked at together for not letting the managers know what was going on and he eventually reached out to me to hang out another time after his depression subsided. The third time we hung out, we met at the gym again. We worked out, and I mentioned I had forgotten my swim trunks so I wouldn't be able to use the spa pool since I only had one pair of shorts with me and didn't want them to get wet. Foxtrot replied to this with "I guess you'll have to go in the steam room naked," and I laughed at the comment even though it didn't seem like he was joking. We went in the steam room (clothed), then the sauna, then I was ready to go home, but he mentioned he was going to the steam room again and asked me if I'd go in with him another time. He seemed disappointed when I told him I had to leave and I thought it to be odd how persistent he was about spending time in that weird-smelling room. I tried to invite him over to hang out at the house and possibly be on the channel again after this, but he didn't want to do that and told me he would meet me at the gym again but that was all he'd want to do. While we had been going to the YMCA together, I had encountered several rude people at the gym who made the experience unpleasant, including guys who hogged the equipment, a woman who tried rushing people off the equipment, and several elderly men who walked around the bathrooms and locker rooms completely naked and would constantly walk up to me and Foxtrot and interrupt our conversation with no clothes on. I expressed my displeasure at all of these events, and Foxtrot replied with a text that sounded annoyed that I was complaining about it. He ended up not replying to my texts anymore after that, which worried me at first as I thought it might be his depression again. But as more time went on and he never texted back or answered, I put two and two together and realized that he had only been hanging out with me because he had a thing for being in the steam room and just wanted a guy to go to the steam room with all the time. When I complained about the gym that day, he must have assumed I wouldn't want to go with him anymore (which wasn't the case) and thus had no reason to talk to me any further. 14) Ozprey - He was a 19-year-old kid I met at my next job in 2017. He enjoyed video games a lot and asked me for advice on how to grow his gaming channel he had on YouTube. I explained to him that I didn't film gaming videos and that he really had to try hard to stand out from the countless other gaming channels out there if he wanted to make it big. We hung out a few times, with him usually bringing one of his friends over to play video games with T-Wrex and me at Wrex's house. He didn't like the idea of being on our channel since it wasn't a gaming channel and that's all he said he was interested in, so we just played video games together as friends. One day, his friend he brought over, who also worked at the same job we did, asked T-Wrex and I if we had any deodorant, then followed that up with "oh wait, never mind" because he knew we didn't use it. He mentioned he hadn't showered or used deodorant for a day and kept occasionally saying "my armpits stink" and smelling them while we played video games, which Ozprey never replied to. I wondered what his 19-year-old friend had been trying to get at but I didn't press him on it and just kept laughing whenever he'd sit there smelling his armpits. At the end of 2017, Ozprey texted me asking me where to find a certain gnome-themed beer that I had mentioned one day at work and asked if I could buy it from the store nearby so he could drop by, pay me for it, and go off to a party to drink it with his friends. I told him I didn't mind helping him out and that I would do so if he would be kind enough to join T-Wrex and me in our traditional new year's stompdown video. He agreed and stopped by to film the video, paid for the drinks, then left. In order to give him a nickname for his appearance, I asked him what animal he liked best, and he said he's always liked birds a lot. I looked up types of birds and found osprey, and he said he liked the sound of it, so I fashioned it as Ozprey. He said the video had been fun to film, but when I offered to feature him in more since he had enjoyed that one, he politely declined. We played video games together once more down the road after that and then we fell out of contact after he got a new job. The stompdown video he filmed would end up getting age-restricted by YouTube because an employee had mistakenly assumed he was underage in it. 15) Private Billy - I met Private Billy at my next restaurant job in 2018 when he was 19. Shortly after this, he joined the Army and is regularly stationed in other countries and only allowed certain amounts of visits home. We filmed one video together along with his friend Artu and T-Wrex that year before he went into the military. His nickname comes from the fact that he was actually ranked private in the Army at the time and he said that his friends used to call him Billy as a joke when he was really young. He married his girlfriend and they joined the Army together shortly after and he was shipped out to another location. The first time he visited was in early 2019 when I was still living with T-Wrex, and he filmed a few videos with us for the channel, including an ab-standing contest with Wrex and a wrestling match against me. His next visit came in summer of that year, and during this time I had moved out of T-Wrex's house and was temporarily living in an apartment before I found the house I'm in now. We filmed breath-holding battle videos during this time, and I managed to hold my breath comfortably for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds while he held my nose and mouth shut, and though I was in the zone and could have easily continued on, I tapped his hand to let go because my head started tingling and I didn't want to scare him by passing out. He had expressed feeling nervous during the warm-up attempt I did just before this filmed round and I didn't want to freak him out by losing consciousness. His next visit was summer of 2021, and he returned for a rematch in wrestling since I beat him the first time. Instead of another regular wrestling match, I explained brethling to him and he agreed to give it a two-round try. This time he weighted 200 pounds, which was thirty pounds heavier than the first time we wrestled (I've pretty much always weighed 150) and he ended up beating me both rounds. During summer of 2022, Billy, who was now Corporal Billy, replied to a text I sent him and told me he would be in town visiting for an entire month. I was really happy to hear this and told him that he should stop by so we could catch up and continue our wrestling competition and he agreed. The day he planned to visit, however, he texted me telling me he was just waiting on his friend Artu to get back to him before he would head over. I was confused as to what Artu had to do with him visiting me after so long since I had only hung out with Artu one time and hadn't maintained contact with him like I had with Billy, but I said okay and waited on him. He said it shouldn't be long, but after 2 hours of not hearing back from him, I texted him asking what was going on and he said he had just picked up Artu and would be heading over soon. 30 minutes after that though, he texted me again and said Artu's dad had just shown up for a visit and that it might be another hour or so before he headed over. By this time it was already 9pm and I was annoyed that Billy had delayed coming by to wait on and run around with his other friend instead of sticking to the plans we had made. I told him we needed to reschedule since that day clearly wasn't working and he apologized and said we would, but any attempt to reschedule after that resulted in him either not replying or saying it wasn't going to work for him. I told him I would be bummed if I didn't get to see him the entire month he was here since it had been so long since we last saw each other, and he sent me an angry response that said "I got a large family that I had to visit and I'm not about to apologize for not making time for someone who's not my blood. You're not special." I took this as an indication that I didn't need to stay in touch with him anymore. 16) Artu - Artu is a friend of Private Billy's who I didn't get a chance to know very well. We had all worked at that same job together, so the first time Private Billy came to visit, he asked if Artu could join him and I said yes. The three of us and T-Wrex played video games together and filmed the Gamer Gang Stompdown video in 2018. When I asked him what he'd like his nickname to be, he said "R2" as in R2-D2, but I decided to spell it out as Artu so it wouldn't get confused with K2's name. Artu and I had an in-joke together I had come up with that we both cracked up about. I envisioned a fancy restaurant with a snooty server who was waiting on a stoner. When the waiter asks the stoner what he'd like to eat, the stoner says "oh wow, you have so many fine selections here. Uh... I'll just have the sketti" (as in spaghetti). The waiter rolls his eyes and says "we don't have SKETTI here, sir, this is a five-star restaurant." Artu and I would always say "I'll have the sketti" to each other after that to make each other laugh. Unfortunately he had rubbed me the wrong way after his visit with Billy because he asked me for my number at work, but when I gave it to him, he only used it to ask me to give him rides since he didn't have a car. I didn't like the idea of being used as a taxi so I said no, and shortly after he got fired from work for not showing up for another scheduled shift because he lived far away and didn't have a ride. I felt bad for him but I barely knew him and there was no way I was about to taxi him to and from work when he lived so far away. 17) Leo Lynx - I met 20-year-old Leo Lynx at my next job during the summer of 2018. It was surreal how quickly we became friends: during his first day at work I asked him who he was and he smiled and introduced himself. There was an instant connection between us and I ended up inviting him over to play video games sometime. We exchanged numbers the moment we met, and he came over the very next day to T-Wrex's while I was there alone to play video games and get to know me better. Since it was summer, I told him T-Wrex's backyard pool was open so he could bring swimming trunks if he wanted. We played video games then hung out together in the pool and just talked, and he told me I needed to visit his house next. His father had just helped get him a house that he was living in by himself, so I agreed to hang out at his place the next time we made plans. I went to his house and he showed me around. He was wearing shoes without socks when he answered the door and made a joke that his shoes reeked really bad because he wears them without socks all the time. Being someone who gets enjoyment out of that as a result of childhood imprinting, I just laughed because I didn't want to just put that out there right away (lol). We were really connecting and becoming fast friends, and he told me that he wished he had a roommate to live with him and help him pay the bills. He offered me the opportunity to live with him, but I told him I already rented a room with T-Wrex or else I would. He was sad that I wasn't available to live with him. He came over again to go swimming with me another time. Out of nowhere, he said "I know my voice sounds gay, but I'm actually not. I get that all the time." I told him I wouldn't care if he was. I went to the bathroom to change into my swim trunks and I was surprised when he came running down the hall after me and stood in the doorway to watch me change. He glanced at my penis while continuing to talk to me and I wasn't bothered by his curiosity. When we were in the pool, he started brainstorming ideas for us to do together as friends: take a trip to Canada, buy a hot tub so we could hang out in it and film videos in it (he followed this with "we could even film the videos in it naked and no one would know but us")... but he wanted me to buy the hot tub and keep it at his house, and for some reason he also wanted to get drunk and run around the kids' playground down the street from him in the middle of the night, and he seemed disappointed when I told him that wouldn't be a smart idea. The next time he came over, he asked me in T-Wrex's backyard on the way to the pool where a good place to change into his swim trunks would be. I told him he could use the garage next to us if he wanted, and he replied with "I thought you were going to tell me to just do it right here" (in front of me). Taken back, I told him it was up to him, and he hesitated then decided to change in the garage anyway. While he was in there, I entertained my curiosity of finding out how bad his shoes actually smelled and found that he was correct when he said they reeked, and my brain loved it. He spent a good deal of the time in the pool that day gossiping about people we worked with to which I tried to hide my annoyance of and change the subject to no avail. We ended up having a wrestling match in the backyard during one of his first visits that I filmed and posted on the channel. I asked him what his nickname should be and he offered, if I remember correctly, Unforgiving Psychopath. I didn't want to use a name like that on YouTube so I told him to try an animal-themed one. He still wasn't sure so I said "what about a lynx?" He said he liked it and called himself Leo the Lollygagging Lynx, which I shortened to Leo Lynx for the channel. After Leo left that afternoon after the wrestling match, T-Wrex came home from work and was holding something in his hand. It was the underwear that Leo Lynx had wore over, and for some reason Wrex had found them in the front yard while walking to the door and he asked why they were there and why it looked like they had white stains in them. I assumed he may have dropped them by mistake. He had also left a sleeveless t-shirt on the patio table which I kept and actually started wearing for a while, however his underwear ended up in the trash and Wrex wasn't happy that they were left in his yard. I was admittedly a little embarrassed that the friend I invited to T-Wrex's house had done this. Leo Lynx was a follower of sorts. At work, he picked up on sayings that other people said and he would start saying them as his own. When he noticed I ran around barefoot all the time, he started driving barefoot when he'd visit and show me that he had no shoes. When I explained to him that I was asexual, he said he felt he could relate and that he was asexual as well, though I'm not sure if he actually is since he claimed to have had sex before. When he realized my channel name was a reference to the fact I didn't use deodorant, he asked me about it at work one day, hesitated, then awkwardly leaned in to try to smell my armpit. He then abruptly stopped using deodorant to try to live the same natural way. The problem was that he had told me on more than one occasion that he only showers two or three times a week (he also told me that he determines whenever he needs to shower by sticking his hand down his pants, touching his balls, then smelling his hand, and if the smell from his balls on his hand is too gross to him, he'll shower that day), so on top of no longer using deodorant, he started getting complaints from his co-workers about smelling bad. One day at work he hugged me and I got a strong whiff of him, and I found that I really liked the way he naturally smelled. He went back to using deodorant though because he didn't want people at work complaining about him anymore. After the backyard wrestling match, I told him we should film more videos for the channel since he had fun with that one. He proposed we try a sport that he said he enjoyed playing with his cousin when he was younger. He called it "poolyard dash," and it consisted of one person trying to swim from one end of the pool to the other while the other person stood in the middle and tried to stop them from reaching the end by trying to dunk them underwater until they tapped out or carried them back to the side they started on. We played several rounds of it and filmed two of them, and it was a lot of fun. After one round, Leo suddenly said "you can keep holding me underwater until I tap, you don't have to let go early" and I smiled and said okay. The next time I kept dunking him and held him under for a while to the point where he had to swim to the edge of the pool and cough out some of the water he had swallowed, but he had an exhilarated look on his face when he first surfaced until he opened his eyes and realized the camera was on him. I asked him if one day he would film a brethling match with me, but he told me he'd rather film poolyard dash instead. I proposed we film both, but he only wanted to film poolyard dash every time. I tried saying "yes, I like filming that with you and I know how much you like it, and this is really fun for me and we should film it too" but he only wanted to film his thing every time, and while I personally thought this to be selfish, I accepted it. While it seemed we were having a lot of fun together, Leo Lynx suddenly began acting strangely. He had previously complained to me about his other friends never hanging out or getting back to him, and one day he tried inviting me to his house at 11pm and I told him that was too late for me and I'd prefer to stop by sooner since I normally went to bed at 1am. He told me that by denying his invite, it was on "on par" with his other friends flaking out on him. I was surprised to hear this but I apologized nevertheless and told him I'd come over next time for sure. He invited me again, at 8pm this time, and I stayed for several hours until midnight. When I arrived, he said "I didn't know if we should be wearing shirts or not" and I laughed, even though it seemed like he wasn't joking. We hung out, watched TV together while he smoked weed, and played video games. I noticed a bottle of pills on an end table and asked him what they were, and he told me it was bipolar medication that he was prescribed but refused to take it because he believed smoking weed was a better way for him to self-medicate. I told him at midnight I was going to leave because I was tired and wanted to go to bed soon and he got offended by this. He said "you're leaving now? I hoped you'd stay until 2am. Now I have to try to find another friend to come over until 2am since you're leaving." There had been no mention or agreement about staying until 2am before this, and I couldn't believe he was so upset that I was leaving after I had been there all night with him when his other friends had flaked on their plans or didn't even reply to him, but I was so tired that I had to leave, even though he tried to keep talking to me to get me to stay later. Suddenly after this, he wasn't as available as he always had been. I'd try to make plans with him and he'd say "sorry I'm busy right now" when I knew he was likely just smoking weed and playing video games like always. I felt like I was being punished for not staying at his house until 2am that day. I continued occasionally trying to make plans and asking what was going on and he eventually stopped replying altogether. I talked to him at work about it and he said "I just felt suffocated in a new relationship. Hanging out shouldn't be an obligation." I was extremely confused by that statement since it had been him who had scolded me for declining his 11pm invite and not feeling obligated to stay at his house until 2am that other day. I recalled the comment he made about not taking his bipolar medication and wondered if this had anything to do with the way he was acting. He had told me that day that by being bipolar, "everything is like a rollercoaster" to him, where one minute you like something but the next minute you don't. After we talked it out, he hugged me and warmed back up to me and told me he had a song idea to use for a stompdown video on my channel called My Grandma's Basement. I explained to him that I couldn't use copyrighted music in the videos, but if he wanted to film a stompdown video with me I could find a similarly cool rap song to use for it. He agreed and stopped by, and we filmed the Substitution Stompdown video together. During this time he had dyed his hair green, which I told him was my favorite color. He came over again another day and filmed a behind-the-scenes plastic bag challenge, his first and only commission. He gave it his best effort and after trying it, said he learned he wasn't into having a bag held over his head, and I laughed about that. The last time he came over, we were sitting on the couch talking for a while. I tried to elaborate on my asexuality and ask him questions about himself to learn more about his identity since he had been sending me subtle, mixed signals by saying he wasn't gay but simultaneously making comments about being naked around each other and living together. He didn't seem interested in the conversation and proposed we play video games instead, so we did. I offered him a beer, and he took one sip of it and decided that he was going to save the rest to drink with his other friends he said he was visiting next. I thought it was pretty rude for him to not drink it with me, and I felt like he was trying to tell me something by saying he'd rather drink it with his "other friends." After this, Leo Lynx again seemed to decide that he didn't like me as much anymore for no real reason aside from that I still didn't accept his offer to move in with him and possibly because I didn't respond to his signals the way he hoped. He went back to saying he was busy and then ignoring my messages again and even not talking to me anymore at work, which really bothered me. He would laugh and joke with other people there but he'd walk by me like he didn't know me, and whenever I tried to talk to him he'd just answer in a short way like I was just a co-worker he didn't really talk to. One time we both went to get a drink at the same time with him behind me, and I smiled and jokingly asked "are you following me?" and he frowned and replied with "I'm not trying to." Since this bothered me, I started being mean back to him and saying things to him like he was trying too hard to fit in with the people he was working with whenever he'd try to buddy up with them in front of me. He heard me but ignored me, and we stayed on these negative terms until the day he walked out on the job with a co-worker who was rumored to be a heroin addict. Down the road, rumors at work started going around that he had gotten into hard drugs and was trying to sell them as a way to support his habit. Since I no longer had his number as a result of the way he had treated me, I tried searching for him on the internet and I found an online listing he had under his real name where he was trying to sell furniture in his house that his parents likely bought for him for drug money, such as the throw pillows off his couch and a glass end table. I also found a court record that showed he had been cited for driving under the influence. Further down the road, I created a throwaway social media account and found one of his family members who had commented on an abandoned account of his and asked him out of concern what had happened to Leo Lynx. He asked who I was, and after I told him I was a friend he met at work who he had suddenly ghosted one day, his relative explained that he had hit rock bottom with drug addiction and that his family had paid to send him to an in-patient rehab in another state. He took my phone number and told me he'd give it to Leo to call me, but Leo never called. Coincidentally, a new social media account under Leo's real name appeared shortly after instead and I reached out to him on it. Leo initially ignored me, but when I tried reaching out again he replied to my message by saying "you look familiar..." so I reminded him who I was. He said "that's right! How are you?" I told him I was doing good and that I had heard what had happened to him and hoped he would heal and stay sober, and he thanked me for the support. I asked him if I had done anything wrong for him to suddenly stop talking to me before, and he replied by saying "no, we just went down different paths is all." I asked him if he was going to move back to Ohio but he said he wanted to stay where he was and start the next chapter of his life there, but he said he'd be back to visit family and answered "yes" when I asked him if he'd want to hang out while he was here. I had to leave for work so I told him I'd talk more with him tomorrow and he said okay. The next day I logged in and tried to message him but he didn't reply. I noticed he had followed a large amount of random women suddenly with this new account he had created, so that the only guy he was following was me, and everyone else was a random female model or just a pretty girl in general he must have spent time finding. I thought this to be very strange. Later that day I checked to see if he had wrote back again and was shocked to see that he had blocked me. In retrospect, it occurred to me that Leo Lynx was struggling with his identity. He was trying to craft an image of himself by following only beautiful women on that account and removing me, a person he had a history with that included him watching me undress, attempting to undress in front of me, and making comments that suggested he had a sexual interest in me. He tried to get me to move in with him (and even made a comment that after I move in with him, he would be replacing T-Wrex on the channel as if I was going to be "dumping" T-Wrex for him) and was angry when I didn't do it or when I didn't hang out with him every time he demanded me to, even when it was at an illogical hour or to do an illegal activity like being drunk in public at a children's playground. He put off a controlling vibe by acting like this and in the end I still tried to be his friend, but he blew me off because I didn't do exactly what he demanded of me. It's still sad to me because we initially connected so well, and I even told him I felt some sort of connection to him the day we met and he had replied that he had felt that connection too. 18) Moukis - I met him at my next job around 2018 when he was 24. It wasn't until 2020 that he hung out with me two times, and during one of those visits he appeared on my channel in a breath-holding battle where I impressed (and scared) him by holding my breath for four minutes. Moukis told me had nursing experience and he said I had been showing definite signs of being about to lose consciousness from not breathing for so long because he hand had been covering my nose and mouth. We couldn't think of a nickname for him at first so I later settled on Moukis (pronounced MEOW-kis) because it was cat-themed and he owned a cat that he liked to talk about and take pictures and videos of. In the beginning of the video he jokingly introduces himself as a random guy from the street that I found to hold my breath, and the reason he said this is because he told me he thought he looked like a homeless person in the video because of the outfit he was wearing (sweatpants and a hoodie with the sleeves rolled up). After I uploaded the video and told him it was live, he texted me saying that as soon as he heard his voice in it he stopped watching because he hated the way his voice sounded. Moukis has really big hands but really small feet and we had a laugh about how disproportionate this was. He also had the softest hands of any guy I've ever met. He's an introverted type of person who's really into video games and anime, much like Lord Rubix. And like Lord Rubix, he only liked to hang out with people every now and then and for short amounts of time because he would become socially drained if he was around people for too long and would need to recharge alone. I honestly relate on the hanging out for a few hours at a time part so we had no problem with this. Unfortunately, shortly after we started hanging out, the pandemic scare was in place and it really affected him. Even though all restrictions in our state had long been lifted, Moukis was still afraid to hang out with anyone for fear of getting sick and spreading it to other people around him, saying "aren't we all supposed to be hermits right now and not leave our houses?" I of course respected his concerns but didn't want him to feel like he had to live his life in fear, so I tried to assure him it had been declared safe by the governor to visit people again since he was still going to work and being around a lot of people on a regular basis anyway, but he reacted by not replying to my texts anymore and removing me as a friend on the temporary Snapchat account I had. I found that to be unnecessary and extreme but there wasn't anything I could do about it so I moved on. 19) Ryno - He was a 20-year-old kid I met at my next job. He originally came into the job as a goofy, fun-loving kid, but shortly after he got settled in he suddenly changed his demeanor to be really serious. Thinking back on it, I always found that to be odd. In 2019, one of my patrons emailed me offering a paid challenge to a new friend who hadn't already filmed it yet: holding their breath underwater for 2 and a half minutes. I started going around asking co-workers of mine if they wanted to give it a shot and earn some money for succeeding, and Ryno stepped up to the challenge. He came over to T-Wrex's house where I was living at the time and I had him try holding his breath above water a few times as a warm-up while I covered his nose and mouth and bantered with him about a made-up robot that comes to life and becomes your friend named Brobot to keep him calm. After the practice, T-Wrex filled his bathtub with water and Ryno changed into swim trunks and got in. To fill the tub quicker, Wrex also ran the bathroom faucet and filled a bucket with it and poured it into the tub, but he didn't realize that this cleaning bucket still had chemical residue in it. Ryno dunked his head under the water to test how well he could comfortably fit in the tub and commented on the chlorine burn of it, assuming it was because it was city water. Despite his best effort, Ryno wasn't able to achieve the 2 and a half minute goal. He made it to about a minute and 17 seconds and was disappointed when he found out he didn't make it and wouldn't end up getting the prize money. I felt bad he didn't succeed so I thought I'd honor his attempt by posting it on the channel (this would have been a behind-the-scenes paid commission if he succeeded) and I let him know I did, but to my surprise his response was "oh no, you did? I look fat in that video." I laughed and told him that wasn't true, and he didn't mind that the video was actually on the channel. Keeping with the animal theme, I nicknamed him Ryno as it was close to his name and I thought it would be a tough-sounding name he'd like, but he laughed and thought I had been playfully making fun of him by calling him that. I offered him to come over and give the challenge another try if he wanted, but he told me that it would just make him more mad if he wasn't able to complete it a second time. I couldn't believe he was actually as upset as he was for something as small as failing a challenge, but he apparently was. I would find out from co-workers that he went around telling people that it was weird he got offered money to hold his breath underwater after I shared the video of him on my channel and some of them watched it and told him they saw him on my show, and to me it seemed like he was now more upset that he failed the challenge and his failure was on display, even though he gave it his best effort. Worse was the fact that for some reason, a bunch of people who never commented on my videos before came out of the woodwork to leave foot fetish comments on his video and he saw them and asked me what the deal with them was. I told him it's a common interest for people to have and he should take it as a compliment, but he was weirded out that the feet comments outnumbered the other comments when his feet were hardly even seen in the video, so I deleted those comments out of respect and sympathy for him. As a result of those comments though, he declined to participate in the videos any further and I continued socializing with him at work after that until the day we no longer worked together. 20) Nawh - Nawh was another 20-year-old co-worker at my next job who also stepped up to the 2 and a half minute underwater breath-holding challenge in May of 2019. While he got closer than Ryno by making it to a minute and twenty-two seconds, he also unfortunately failed the challenge, and Lord Rubix ended up completing it a while after that and taking the prize money instead. He offered "Naw" as a nickname for himself as it was part of his real name, and I added the silent "h" to the end of it for aesthetic reasons. Nawh was obsessed with disc golf -- as in, the sport of throwing Frisbees into goals set up in the woods. He told me that playing this sport saved him from teenage angst and depression, and he dreamed to be a champion of it one day. I went with him a few times to play, but he was too competitive about it and would get angry and slam the discs on the ground if he didn't make it in the amount of throws he wanted to. I didn't mind how well I played, I was just there to have fun, and his attitude kind of took away from the fun factor. He said he wanted to start a YouTube channel about disc golf and I offered to help him and even participate on it, but he never got it off the ground while we were hanging out. I put a short clip of him throwing a disc at the beginning of his underwater challenge and he really enjoyed it. Socializing with Nawh in a way was like hanging out with a younger brother because of how our sense of humor aligned and we made each other laugh with the jokes we'd tell. Whereas most people typically laughed at the ridiculous things I would come up, Nawh was one who would go along it and come up with something similarly absurd for laughs. For example, when I was a kid, people would call farts "barking spiders" and I always thought that was a weird and funny saying, and when I remembered this, I started calling farts "spiderbarks." I let Nawh in on the joke and he found it amusing as well. One day I told him that an ice cream shop down the road had started selling "spiderbark sundaes" and he cracked up about the absurdity of it. During a commission we filmed together which involved stepping on toy army men, he looked at me and said "I could go for one of those spiderbark sundaes right about now" and it was the funniest thing to hear somebody else say. Nawh returned later in 2019 to film the Selfie Spy Stompdown video with me, and this is also when he filmed the paid commission with me that involved us having to painfully walk on toy soldiers first in socks and then barefoot. He was a good sport about it and had a lot of fun filming it with me, but after that he became dead-set on dedicating all his time to practicing disc golf because he hoped one day to do it for a living. He also met a girlfriend shortly after that who was likewise into disc golf and all his time away from work went toward her and playing the sport. He sent me a long text one day after this apologizing for neglecting his friends, including me, and explaining that he feels he needs to put all his time and energy into practicing disc golf and playing in tournaments, which he said he even earned some money from by winning a few, in order to become the champion he dreamed of being. I accepted this from him, and after he got laid off from the job we worked at together, we fell out of touch. 21) Nikita - She had the honor of being the first female featured friend on my channel. The only reason for this is that just like the show Jackass that inspired me, the type of content I film is mostly something that a bunch of guys would get together and do. I've invited several female friends and co-workers over the years to participate, but Nikita has been the only one so far to accept. I ran into her at my next restaurant job in 2019 when she came in as a delivery driver and recognized me. She was 22 at the time. Apparently she had started working at the previous restaurant job I was at just before Danny Duck had gotten me fired and remembered me from it. I tried my hardest but I couldn't remember her. Still, it was nice to see her again and we talked for a while, and she said she might see me around when she left. A few days later, Toast told me that she had come by again asking about me during one of my days off. Toast told her I wasn't there and gave her the link to my YouTube channel and told her to check it out. Shortly after that, she came into my work again on a day that I was there and told me she had seen my channel. She asked me why it was named "No Deo" and I told her it was because I didn't use deodorant. She replied to that by saying she had always liked the way guys naturally smelled, and I thought that was cool to hear. I exchanged numbers with her and told her to reach out to me if she wanted to hang out. At this time I was living in an apartment because I hadn't yet found my own house after moving out from T-Wrex's. She ended up coming over around September of 2019, and during her visit I offered to impress her with my breath-holding talent. We ended up filming a breath-holding video where I lasted for 3 minutes, and this would be the only video she appeared in. She decided on the nickname of Nikita because she liked it and said she had gone by it before. She also recorded some footage of me for a comedy video of her own she wanted to edit that she ended up sending to me. The idea behind her video was "what if people regrew their limbs like trees and certain animals do," so she had me put my arms halfway into my shirt sleeves as if they were in the process of regrowing, and she blurred out my nose during another scene to make it look like it had fallen off and was going to have to grow back. I don't believe she ever uploaded the video since it was just something for her to have of me and I thought it was neat to get to be her video model. When I uploaded the video with her to my channel, I was disgusted when it was initially met by rude comments from a few people who were following my show. Several guys, some who I didn't recognize to have ever commented on any of my content before, had written things like "ew, a girl," and "this has always been a channel of guys, I'm unsubscribing." It was sickening to see a few followers of mine had gotten so angry simply because I had featured a female friend on my channel for the first time as if women had no place on my show. I never once declared my channel to be a boys only club, nor did I ever have anything negative to say about women, so these people clearly did not represent my fanbase and were only there for their own selfish reasons. I stood up for Nikita in replies to the comments, and this caused some of my actual fans to jump in and support her with kindness as well. I ended up deleting the negative comments but unfortunately Nikita said she had read them before I removed them. She said she didn't care, but I can't imagine that she wasn't a little bothered by it. She reached out to me another day and said she happened to be in the area during a delivery for her job. I told her I was working out and she could come by if she wanted, so she did. She only had a moment to hang out so she came in, hugged me, and talked for a little before leaving. After she left, she texted me and asked me why I didn't smell if I was working out and didn't use deodorant. I told her I had just started working out and hadn't built up a sweat, and I assured her that I didn't use deodorant and told her she could smell my armpits if she didn't believe me. She proposed that we watch a movie together where we could lay together and she could more subtly entertain this and I agreed to her plan. Over the next couple of days though, she told me that she was on the fence about moving out of state because she didn't like Ohio and wanted to get away from the family she had here. I was surprised to hear this and tried to convince her to stay since we were just getting to know each other and become better friends. She replied to this by saying "I'll stay if I have someone to stay with." I wondered to myself if she was trying to ask me if she could move into the apartment I was in, but having only hung out with her briefly two times, I wasn't about to just let her move in with me so soon so I didn't entertain it. The next day she started texting me again and we were talking, then she again brought up that she was considering moving out of state unless she had a place she could stay. I asked her where she's been staying and she said it was with a friend, but she couldn't stay there anymore. It was clear to me that she was trying to press me into letting her move in with me but I still wasn't ready for that to happen so soon, so I tried to tell her to work something out with her friend or family because I wanted to see her more. After this, she suddenly stopped texting me. I tried reaching out to her the next few days but didn't get a response. Finally I sent a text asking why I wasn't hearing from her anymore and she wrote back and said "I just don't think it's worth talking to you anymore if I'm not going to be living in this state soon anyway." I was shocked to hear this and asked her why she wouldn't want to stay in touch regardless of where she lived since we were friends. She suddenly began insulting me in texts by calling me a freak and saying "this is why you're still single at your age" (she didn't realize I'm not into dating since she didn't get to know me well enough) so I told her that the two of us didn't need to see or speak to each other again. Ironically she had even tried to insult me for being open about body odor being a reward trigger for me even though she had told me that she always enjoyed the natural smell of men. Toast asked me at work how things were going with her and I told him what happened, and he was shocked to hear it. I was very flattered that she liked me and I did like her initially as a friend, but I didn't appreciate her trying to barge into my living space the way she did so soon, and when I didn't welcome her request to move in with me, I certainly didn't appreciate her throwing a fit about it and resorting to childish insults. I had made it clear I was wanting to hang out with her more and get to know her better but her "now or never" attitude ruined any chance of that. I had never had a girl tell me she liked the fact that I didn't use deodorant and wanted to enjoy the way I naturally smell before and I wanted to explore this with her, so it's sad she ended up acting the way she did. I saw her once more down the road after this when she came into my work one final time. She looked hurt when she saw me and began frantically texting someone on her phone. After she left, one of my co-workers told me that she had pointed me out to her and said that "we had history" together. I laughed and informed my co-worker that I had only hung out with her two times and to just ignore her because she was acting crazy. In all honesty, I feel like I dodged a bullet by not allowing myself to be drawn into a toxic situation like that. 22) Nightwolf - He was 25 when I met him in 2020 and made his one-time appearance in a video on my channel. He was a delivery driver I met at my next restaurant job who happened to come in to pick up orders three times in one day. Since I was starting to see him so much, I started talking to him and he seemed really friendly so we exchanged numbers and became friends. The first few times he planned to stop by, he ended up canceling on me and apologizing. He began texting me and told me he was a musician, then he asked me more about myself, including what other work I did, so I told him about my YouTube channel. He asked for a link to it so I sent it to him, and he checked it out and said he enjoyed it, particularly the wrestling matches I filmed with my friends. He ended up coming over the next time we made plans. Once at my house, Nightwolf told me that his interpretation of my channel was that it was a comedy show where my friends and I got to have fun and make people laugh with our antics and challenges, but he also said he saw a sexual undertone to some of the videos we filmed together, particularly the duct tape escape challenges. He said he realized we were all obviously just good friends, but videos like that gave him the impression that we also had a mild sexual energy together as close friends. I thanked him for checking out my channel and invited him to be on it, and he told me he'd enjoy filming a wrestling match. I asked him if he wanted to film one that day but he replied with "we need to get to know each other better" and said he'd do it another time. Nightwolf told me he too didn't use deodorant, and instead he applied a homemade natural deodorant under his arms. He also said he was a spiritual person who would write symbols and make wishes whenever there was a full moon, and he also dabbled in magic and spells and used tarot cards, and though I wasn't into it myself, I respected his practice of the occult. He also ate a very strict diet that always included avocado. He explained that he used to be overweight but had become healthier by eating less and sticking with this strict diet he was now on and staying spiritual. As a result of everything he told me about himself and his long-haired appearance, I nicknamed him Nightwolf after the Native American Mortal Kombat character who fights with spiritual energy. He loved the nickname. The next time he stopped by, he sat down with me in front of my computer and asked me to arrange my YouTube videos in order of what was most viewed. He noted that wrestling and brethling matches, workout challenges, breath-holding contests, body odor humor, and tickling videos were at the top of the list. He was trying to integrate himself into the show by participating in something that was popular that he would enjoy partaking in. He proposed that he could try to hold his breath in a video, saying he'd likely make it to 3 minutes, which I said would be impressive. He ended up deciding on a wrestling match instead, but he wanted to put a unique touch on it. He had noticed I filmed sparring videos wearing boxing gloves and proposed that we film a combination sport that included both boxing and wrestling. Seeing as brethling was a combination of breath-holding and wrestling that the fans loved, I instantly liked his idea, and we both brainstormed names for the new sport. We initially settled on "battle primale" (a portmanteau of 'primal' and 'royale') but I later changed it to "battle broyale." The rules were simple: it's a wrestling match where you get to bop each other with boxing gloves, and the objective is to wrestle your opponent to the ground and get them to tap out with a submission hold. We both had a lot of fun turning his idea into a reality, and after I uploaded the video, my fans welcomed him to the show. I invited him to integrate more into the content if he desired and he said he did, and I also offered to allow him to participate in the paid video commissions with me. He said he'd be happy to and asked what types of video scenarios I get paid to film. I told him there were athletic challenges, re-enactments of movie scenes, bully-themed videos, breath-holding scenarios, and a lot more, and he said he was curious to see what people would want to pay to see him film. He smiled and said "I would even lick feet and suck toes for the right amount of money" but I laughed and told him I didn't film videos like that. During one of his visits, we were having an open-minded discussion like we typically did whenever we talked, and Nightwolf told me a story about how he had created an account on Grindr, the gay dating app, just to see who would respond to his profile. He told me a man older than him had reached out and offered to perform a sex act on him for money, and Nightwolf said he agreed and met the man somewhere and that it had happened. He said the experience had been enjoyable but that he wasn't interested in doing something like that again, and he maintained that he was mostly straight and favored women over men. I figured he may have been telling me this story to try to relate to me more since I'm open about the fact that I've had romantic encounters with both males and females in my life, but I wasn't sure of his true intentions so I told him that we could become closer friends in time like the friendship I had with T-Wrex and Lord Rubix if he wanted, and he said he'd keep an open mind to it. I put the word out to my fans that Nightwolf was interested in video commissions. Shortly after that, two commission offers for him came in. One was a robbery-themed scenario where I acted as a home invader who tied Nightwolf up, intimidated him, then pretended to steal his valuables, and the other was a scenario where Nightwolf would tickle me and bully me by putting his bare feet in my face. I texted him and let him know about the two commissions. His response was "I like the sound of the robbery one but I don't know if I'd be comfortable putting my feet on you." I told him that was okay and he of course didn't have to do anything he didn't want to do. He said he would think about it and get back to me, and he proposed that the next video for the channel we film together should be a duct tape escape scenario that continued off from the first video we had filmed. Since he lost the battle broyale match, he said I should tape him up really good on camera and walk off screen as if I left him like that and he would then try to escape from the tape. I told him I liked his idea and that we'd film it the next time he came over. I tried to follow up with him about coming over to do this but I didn't get a response. I waited until a few days passed and then texted him again, and he replied with "you didn't get the text I sent you?" I told him I didn't, and he sent me a screenshot of a long text he had apparently tried to send me days ago that I never received. In this lengthy text, he basically said that he had thought long and hard about everything but ultimately decided that he "wasn't interested in tickling guys, putting his feet on guys, or smelling or being smelled by other guys," and as a result he would be pulling out from filming videos any further. He also claimed that he feared his inclusion in these videos could ruin a chance for him to be a successful musician down the road. His text also mentioned that he regretted that his choice of words could have caused me to think he was interested in me sexually and he said he hoped we could still remain friends. I called him and told him I was shocked by all of this. I reminded him that he didn't have to do anything he didn't want to do, and I offered that we could continue filming the sport we created together if he was only comfortable doing that, and I let him know I would remove his name from the commission participants list. He said he wasn't interested in filming anything anymore though, and this was disappointing to hear. I asked him why he made the comment that he'd film anything for the right price, including sucking toes, but he said he didn't have an answer for that. I also expressed confusion about his mention of thinking he was accidentally leading me on and asked him why he had told me the Grindr meetup story if this was such a concern to him. He defensively tried to tell me that he had made that story up, but when I reminded him that he had in fact showed me his Grindr profile that day on his phone, he got angry with me. Seeing as this conversation wasn't going in a good direction, I told him I wouldn't bother him anymore and asked him not to return to my place of employment. It became clear to me afterward that Nightwolf was struggling with his identity. In retrospect, I recalled how he had mentioned that he viewed certain videos on my channel to have a sexual chemistry to them, and he specifically mentioned the duct tape escapes. After the initial wrestling video we filmed together, he had proposed we film a duct tape escape together where I would tie him up. Why would he want to film a video with me that he viewed as sexual? I also recalled how he said he had liked the robbery commission idea where I would have tied him up during it, but he had been unnerved by the one that involved him putting his feet in my face to humiliate me. He had also initially proposed having me hold his breath, and I put all of this together in my mind. I realized that Nightwolf had only started participating in videos with me that appealed to his personal interests, and that he apparently viewed the rest of my show as weird and simply hadn't expressed that in the beginning. He told me he had wanted to integrate into the entire show and build on it with me and actually offer ideas for content, but ultimately he only cared about participating in scenarios where I would manhandle him in a wrestling match, control his breath, or tie him up. If he would have just been honest and said this to me in the beginning, or even said it to me at any given time instead of telling me he wanted to be a part of the entire show, I would have honored this decision for him and entertained it. I wouldn't have seen it as a selfish decision since I had fun participating with him and it of course would have made me happy to make my friend feel good. It was just like with Leo Lynx only wanting to play his "poolyard dash" sport all the time because he really liked it, or with Foxtrot only trying to get me to go to the gym with him all the time because he wanted a guy to hang out with in the steam room. It was selfish of them to only think about themselves, but if it was fun to me and I liked them as friends, I would still hang out and do it. Nightwolf had also made negative comments about T-Wrex several times while we hung out despite never meeting him. He said that he didn't feel it was fair that I paid T-Wrex half of the channel's earnings when I did all the technical work, but I told him T-Wrex was my best friend and that meant more than money to me. When I mentioned that T-Wrex had coined the term "brethling" for the other combination sport I filmed on my channel, Nightwolf made a face and said it sounded like the dumb name of a lung disease or something. I was reminded of how Leo Lynx had try to say he would be taking T-Wrex's place on the channel once he started filming with me as if I was going to have to stop hanging out with Wrex if I was going to be friends with him. Down the road, I attempted to reach out to Nightwolf to make peace and give him a second chance at being friends. He informed me he had moved down south several weeks prior because he felt abandoned by everyone in his life, including his own family. I was surprised to hear this and assumed he may be experiencing mental struggles. He apologized for reacting the way he did when he sent the long text to me and admitted that the claim he made about fearing for his future as a musician by being in videos with me had been a lie, which seemed to prove to me that my assumption of his identity struggle had been correct. While we were both very friendly during this text exchange at first, he suddenly changed moods in his messages and complained that I said negative things about him on my channel after he left because I had made a since-deleted post informing everyone that he had abruptly dropped out with the reason why. I told him I meant no harm by it and had simply told my fans the truth, but he had already made a complete turnaround from apologizing to me and was back to acting the way he did when I had called him after receiving that long text from him so I wished him well and told him I hope things get better for him, and we didn't contact each other any further. 23) Draco - I first met Draco at my next job when he was 19, but it wasn't until early 2021 when he was 21 that we actually started hanging out and he first appeared on my channel. Draco really stood out to me as a kind and positive spirit when I first met him who went out to his way to make people feel good. He would come up to me at work and start singing songs from popular animated movies or just touch me in a friendly, affectionate way that made me smile and feel good inside. He was definitely a rare breed in my opinion, especially for his age. Unfortunately that changed for him over the years. Draco was really interested in mind expansion and spoke highly of hallucinogenic experiences. He also used fluoride-free toothpaste and natural deodorant. I respected his open-minded state of consciousness and we exchanged outlooks on life, and during this he told me how he was pushing for a fluoride-free water experience in his area and how he had successfully made headway with it at one point. While he had been kind to me, he made other people at our job uncomfortable after he had looked up a female co-worker's full name on the schedule, searched for her online, and found her Instagram account and sent her a follow request. Instead of speaking to her at work, Draco began leaving comments on her photos and sending her messages telling her how beautiful he thought she was and she let everyone know what he was doing. Draco was a theater actor and told me about some of the plays he's been in. Down the road, he would even get to be featured as an extra on a Netflix show which was another step for him in acting. His acting career prematurely ended after he refused their strict medical guidelines. After loaning me several pairs of shoes to use for a comedy skit on my channel, Draco ended up leaving the job we met at to move to another state for a while to pursue a mechanical career, and we kept in touch while he lived there. I was happy when he announced down the road that he was moving back, and he got a mechanical job here in Ohio when he returned. It was during this time that Draco and I began hanging out, and he ended up participating in two events of the 2021 Brolympics with me for my channel. I nicknamed him Draco since it sounds similar to his name, and he said he liked it since it also meant "dragon" in Latin. He held his breath in the iron lungs event the first day we filmed together, and another day he hung from the pull-up bar in my weight room with me as long as he could. We filmed a round of me holding my breath with him the same day as his but I didn't end up editing it and uploading it to the channel; instead it sat around on my computer for a while until I shared it as an outtake with my fans on Patreon. I also uploaded a short video of us playfully punching each other in the abs wearing boxing gloves to my channel that we had filmed right after the bar-hanging event. The two of us made plans to continue hanging out and compete in the other events of the Brolympics together, which were the abs of steel challenge and the battle broyale match. He said they both sounded fun and he would be down to take me on in wrestling or brethling, but the next few times he visited he always had some sort of lame excuse for not doing it. After that day, it became harder to get ahold of Draco. Coincidentally, he mentioned that he now had a girlfriend who's ten years older than him that he now lives with. Suddenly, he was too busy all the time to hang out anymore, and he continued saying this for an entire year. During spring of 2022, I shared a video of all the wood in my yard that I had removed from the old garage that I had torn down as a story on Snapchat when I temporarily had a Snap account. Draco replied to the video and said he wanted to take the wood from me so he could build a chicken coop with it at his house. I wondered how he'd be able to find time to pick it up since he was allegedly so busy all the time, but he quickly planned for a day to drive down to me and take it. I was originally going to post an ad and attempt to sell it since reclaimed wood has a value to it, but I decided to be kind and let Draco take it for free since he was a friend of mine, even though he had hardly replied to me for a full year before this and hadn't made any attempt to get together. In fact, Draco had upset me a while before this when he suddenly sent me a long string of spam text messages that had obviously been copy-pasted which were trying to lure me to sign up for some shady bank service that would result in him getting paid a referral bonus. I thought his phone may have been hacked for a moment, but when I wrote back he told me that he was broke and repeatedly tried to get me to sign up for the service so he could get money out of me. I declined and told him it was strange that he didn't seem to have time to reply to me much except to send me walls of spam text and try to use me to get money. I also asked him how he was broke after he said he's been so busy working all the time lately. In the end, I didn't appreciate him trying to use me for money after not bothering to reply to me and making no attempt to get together for so long. In June of 2022, Draco made plans to visit my house with a truck to pick up some of the wood from my garage. I told him this would be a great opportunity to film the wrestling match he had postponed so long ago, and right at this time a fan had emailed me with a wrestling-themed commission he wanted to pay to see. Draco tried to give me yet another lame excuse for why he couldn't participate but I told him I needed a second person for it and offered to pay him to fill in, even though I was giving him this truckload of valuable wood for free. Only under this circumstance did he agree to do it, and after the fan emailed me his appreciation of the video and told me I was welcome to upload it on my channel if I wanted to, I did just that. While he had been loading the wood into his truck with my help, Draco kept saying "oh yeah, this is real nice wood. This is worth a lot" in a greedy sounding manner, and he told me he wanted to return to my house next week with a trailer attached to the truck so he could take more of it. I told him he was welcome as a friend to take all of it that he needed, and he made plans to come over the next week. Because I had uploaded the wrestling video to my channel for all my fans to see, some of my patrons emailed me asking if Draco would be available to film more video commissions. I texted Draco and let him know, and I again told him I would share the earnings from the commissions with him along with giving him the rest of the garage wood. He agreed to fill in for the videos while he was here picking up the wood. When the day came, he texted me and told me he was on his way to my house but said he "unfortunately didn't have any time to hang out at all" and gave yet another lame excuse for it. He was basically telling me he wasn't going to follow through on helping me by filling in for the video commissions he originally said he would, and instead he somehow only had exactly enough time to stop by and take the supplies from me. By this time, I was sick of Draco blowing me off and making lame excuses to not help me out or spend any time hanging out with me. It was also a very strange coincidence how he hadn't had any free time to ever hang out with me for a full year after finding and moving in with a girlfriend, but as soon as he saw that I had that wood at my house, he magically found time to come by not once, by two weekends in a row, and it was obviously only because it benefited him and he was selfishly taking advantage of my kindness as a friend in letting him have the building supplies for free. I helped him load the supplies in his truck and was clearly bothered during it, but he acted like he didn't notice and continued with his "oh yeah, this is great wood" comments instead. After he left, I sent him a text telling him I thought it was shitty how he had bailed on helping me out with my show after he had agreed to and how he had basically just used me for free building supplies for his house. He didn't reply or apologize. It's no coincidence he only found time to come by because I had something he wanted, and even though I helped him out, he didn't care to help me out and had no remorse about it. 24) Redmane - I met Redmane at my third restaurant job when he was 19, and at the beginning of 2021 we played video games and filmed YouTube videos together. He had moved to Ohio from his home state of Michigan to stay with one of his family members and hadn't had a chance to make any friends since being in the state, although he did have a girlfriend that he met at work. I thought he was a really funny dude and he came up with this secret handshake for us to use every time we worked together. He was really happy to meet someone who wanted to hang out with him, and while we were playing video games one day at my house he told me a lot about himself and his family. I invited him to participate in the 2021 Brolympics I was filming for my channel at the time and he ended up appearing in all four events. I nicknamed him Redmane because of his long, red hair. The first day, we filmed a battle broyale match and he also said he wanted to give the abs of steel challenge a try, and he ended up completing it. That accomplishment currently has over 10,000 video views on my channel. The next time he came over we filmed a challenge together of how long we could hang from the pull-up bar in my weight room, then we filmed a breath-holding challenge. I went to cover his nose and mouth with my hand like we always do in those videos but he asked if he could just hold his own nose instead because one of his brothers used to torment him by suffocating him like that, so he did it his way. We also filmed a version after that where I held my breath while he held my nose shut, but the front-facing camera failed to record it and I didn't want to post the side angle only on the channel so it became an outtake that I shared with my fans on Patreon. I got a chance to smell his shoes he wore over one day and my brain enjoyed the fact that they kind of smelled. Redmane started revealing to everyone at work that he was feeling homesick and was thinking about moving back to Michigan. He told me this too but I reminded him that he hadn't even been in Ohio for a full year yet and that he should give it more time before he makes a decision to move back. He said he would, but ultimately he decided he was going to move back anyway. Him and his girlfriend agreed to split, he put in his two week notice at work, and he was on his way back home. He came over one more time shortly before he left and we filmed the Say Goodbye Stompdown together where he told all of his new fans on my channel that he was moving back home, but that he would be sure to visit. He moved back to Michigan and we've kept in touch ever since. Redmane visited Ohio once during Halloween of 2021 for a few days and he stopped into his old job to visit everyone. I was at work that day and it was really cool getting to see each other again. He told me he had to drive back the next day because he had a job in Michigan, but we made plans for him to stop by my house the afternoon before he made the drive. Unfortunately I didn't hear back from him the next day, and he apologized and said he ended up sleeping in late and having to leave right after he finally woke up. In May 2022, Redmane told me things weren't working out for him in Michigan and that he was hoping he'd be able to move back to Ohio and stay with his relative again for a few months until he could figure out what he wanted to do. He had been speaking with recruiters in Michigan and was considering joining a branch of the military after being in Ohio for a while and returning to his old job here. I was happy to hear he'd be coming back and offered to help him any way that I could, but unfortunately his relative informed him that this wasn't a good time for him to stay with him. Redmane told me he had gotten fired from a few jobs and was currently unemployed and partying all the time with alcohol and marijuana. He had a girlfriend he had met at a party for a little while who wasn't fond of the fact that he didn't have a job. He tried asking me to loan him money a few times but I knew he wouldn't be able to pay me back since he wasn't working and was just getting drunk and high instead. Plans for him to visit became even less possible when he told me his car had broken down and he probably going to have to scrap it since he couldn't afford the repairs. His girlfriend also left him after he lost his vehicle and was still jobless and broke and asking everyone for money to get drunk and high with, and he eventually stopped replying to me because I wouldn't give him money so I wished him luck getting himself out of the hole he dug himself in and stopped reaching out. 25) Galyx - Being 18 years old when I met him in 2021 and throughout his appearance on my show, Galyx is tied as the youngest featured friend along with Tuna Kan Kel, who was 18 during his first channel appearance and commission, though Kel was 19 for all of his appearances after that, making Galyx the youngest. I met Galyx at my third restaurant job in 2021 and he was a quiet kid who did his work and kept to himself. Other people there would ask each other why he never seemed to talk to anyone and would also say that they couldn't get him to ever say much. I started talking to him and joking around with him at work and he warmed up to it. I realized that all anyone had to do was give him a chance and he actually had a lot to say when he got to know someone well enough. Galyx told me he enjoyed playing Super Smash Bros. and I told him I liked the game a lot as well. I invited him over to play sometime, and we exchanged numbers and he ended up visiting my house not too long after that. We socialized while we played video games together, and in contrast to when he was at work, he had a lot to talk about while we hung out. In fact, there was never a moment when he was at my house any day he was over that we weren't talking. While he was over that first day, I brought up that I had a YouTube channel and he said he'd like to be on it. We filmed a few events for the 2021 Brolympics together, including the breath-holding battle and a battle broyale match. He also filmed a stompdown with me and participated in a traditional Teleturkeys skit with me for Thanksgiving. I nicknamed him Galyx because it was part of a nickname he already used, and he's a big Star Wars fan so I fashioned it to resemble the word "galaxy." Galyx is also really into Legos and told me down the road that he spent all the money he had made filming video commissions on an expensive Lego set he had been wanting for a while. After his channel appearances gave him a warm reception with my fans, I asked him if he'd be interested in filming video commissions that patrons would send in via email. He liked the idea, and his first video commission was a commentary where he answered questions about the movie Flubber and re-enacted one of the scenes from it. He began integrating more into the show by filming other commissions with me like stinkfoot bully scenes, plastic bag challenges, and duct tape robbery re-enactments. At one point I asked Galyx what has favorite and least favorite videos he had filmed were. He told me his favorite had been the very first breath-holding videos we filmed together for the channel, and he said his least favorite was a commission where he had to sit there on my bed while I smelled his feet for several minutes. Despite wearing size 13, Galyx didn't really have smelly shoes or feet so it was disappointing on my end as well. He said he had no judgment about it but it was just weird for him to sit there while I did nothing aside from that. He admitted he had also been nervous while holding a plastic bag around my head in one commission and sealing me into a mattress-sized vacuum bag in another because he didn't want anything to accidentally happen to me, and he hated how badly it hurt to pull duct tape off of his skin. Despite his mixed feelings about some of the scenarios we filmed, he still did a good job filming the videos whenever he'd stop by and he had a lot of fun doing it. He put on a particularly good performance in a commission called Galyx Socknosis, which ended up being his final video he filmed with me. By now he had been getting used to the type of roles we were being cast to film, and this was a solo video where he was spot on with the banter and very convincing with the character he was asked to play from beginning to end. I was personally really impressed by it and liked how he was growing with the show so well. Unfortunately he became unhappy at the job we met at over time and ended up leaving. For a while he couldn't find another job and continued coming around and filming videos with me, until one day he found an overnight packaging job with graveyard hours. It became difficult for him to make plans as often once he started this job but he managed to come over a few times after that. The last two times he visited he was very tired from the combination of starting college and working overnight hours, and he spent a good amount of time complaining about it while he was here. I wasn't able to lift his spirits despite my efforts. During his last day over he warned me he was tired and grumpy, and he was in a very negative mood the entire time. He complained about having to film the video commissions we ended up recording and he also complained about people at his job getting on his nerves. It was sad to see him like this since he was normally laughing and telling jokes whenever he was here. After that day, Galyx became a lot harder to get ahold of. He would go days and weeks before replying to me. When I told him it had been a while since we last hung out, he replied with "yeah it has been a while hasn't it" with a crying and laughing emoji. Mutual friends from the job we had met at, including ones who had known him for years, also said they hadn't heard from him in a long time when I asked them out of concern. I told him how I had lost friends to situations like this where they were overwhelmed and overworked and that I hoped we wouldn't fall out of contact. The last time Galyx replied to me was to say he had found a girlfriend. He didn't reply to my texts I followed up with after that, and I noticed he had removed me as a friend on Snapchat when I temporarily had a Snap account. He apparently decided he didn't have time to be friends with me anymore and instead of worrying about finding time to keep in touch, he decided he would just ghost me. This was really disappointing, seeing as I was the only person who had taken the time to become friends with him at the job I met him at when everyone else called him weird and quiet, but there was nothing I could do about it. I've learned over the years that friendship is fleeting. People will make time to socialize and hang out with you when it's convenient to them, but once they feel they no longer need you or they get into a relationship, they either stop replying or claim they're too busy all the time anymore to see you. While I'll continue including friends on my show who want to be on it, I'm aware that most people I meet don't have the time or interest to commit to it.
Seeing as I don't do relationships, I instead put my focus into friendships and I'm actually still in touch with my best friend from when I was 16 even though we live in different states and may never see each other again, but I've grown to learn that not everyone cares about friendship as much as I do or takes it as seriously. That's part of the adventure and challenge of life though, and it's always fun to get to meet new people, build new friendships, and see where those connections take me.
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Hey everyone! Thanks for the continued views and support!
I know you guys love to see brethling matches and stinkpit skits the most, but it's been really hard to find friends who still have the time, motivation and interest to participate on the show. K2 has been coming by once a month to film commissions and be on the channel, but he's been the only one as of late. I hope everyone understands The No Deo Hero is a solo channel that only occasionally features friends. I love filming videos for all of you to enjoy and connect with, and I appreciate the continued support throughout the difficulty of finding people to film with. Honestly, I'm perfectly happy filming solo videos if that's what it takes to keep the show alive and I know my true fans will be happy to see that since it's better than nothing at all. I'm too passionate and productive to let anything out of my control get in the way of filming for you 💚 - Primal |
November 2023
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